(2017) Science and education, 7, 82-88. Odessa.

Dmytro Syzonov,
PhD (Candidate of Philological Sciences), associate professor,
Department of Stylistics and Language Communication,
Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv,
14, Shevchenko Boulevard, Kyiv, Ukraine

PSYCHOLINGUISTIC BASES OF MEDIA LITERACY:
CONSIDERING THE ISSUE OF MEDIA TEXTS INTERPRETATION

The paper deals with psycholinguistic peculiarities of media communication. Media texts are analyzed with regard to extra- and intertextual factors such as multiculturalism, linguistic imperalism, media formats rennovation, etc. The experiment was based on the headlines of posts taken from Facebook and Twitter and was aimed at determining the emotions which arise in respondents reading them. 20 university students aged from 17 till 20 were surveyed by means of a questionnaire which is focused on the determination of respondents’ psychology of emotions. The questionnaire consists of two units: with yes-no questions and with free-answers questions. The emotional scale was assessed by three values: negative, positive and neutral. According to the research outcomes, most of the respondents pay attention to the headline before reading the text of the post (95%) and assess its content according to the headline (90%) which shows headlines’ manipulation effect. 55% of the respondents manifested positive emotions together with their positive assessment of the media text. Similarly, they manifested negative emotions together with their negative assessment of the text which shows the extra linguistic effect on the content of a media text, particularly political, moral, ethical or social. 25% of the respondents were neutral to the headlines and did not want to read the texts which shows the high level of their impassive attitude to the information flow. It means that people’s emotions are affected by the headlines with positive or negative assessment. It has been found that psycholinguistic bases of media literacy are manifested in the understanding of the essence of a media text and its main assignment, in the analysis of conscious/subconscious impact on a respondent, in search for main methods and tactics with the help of which a recipient would not be a passive media consumer but a participant of active socio-political processes by means of mass media.

media psychology, media linguistics, psycholinguistics, media literacy, mass media, media planning, media monitoring.

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